Meerut's book cover art business fading away

MEERUT: Textbook printing is not the only discipline that fuels the publishing industry in Meerut. Pulp fiction- Hindi novels displaying women in diaphanous sarees and men with tilted hats on their covers-is also what has breathed equal amount of life and blood into the heaving printing presses of this district for several decades.

Meerut has been a hub for publishers, writers and artists of pulp fiction since its inception. The city has brought forward some of the greatest Hindi pulp authors like Ved Prakash Sharma and Surender Mohan Pathak but as the digital winds of change reach Meerut, book cover artists, once as important for the sale of Hindi novels as the story-teller himself, are being replaced by graphic artists working on computers and LCD monitors.

"The Indian pulp fiction industry is estimated to be close to Rs 70-crore industry, of which Meerut today alone has a contribution of Rs 20-25 crore," says Shagun Sharma, publisher of Tulsi Pocket Books, one of the biggest publishers of Hindi pulp novels in Meerut. Tulsi publication prints new and reprints approx 1 lakh copies of pulp novels every month. "When the industry in Meerut was at it peak-that is till the year 2005-the turnover was approx from Rs 30 to Rs 35 crore," Mr Sharma adds.

This downslide has a direct fallout on the cover artists who once labouriously designed oil works to lure the buyers and made a small fortune themselves.

"Computers have replaced all the manual artwork," says Mr Sharma, who once had 20 artists working for them to design their covers. "The era of computer and technology came up with its repercussions. Today, most of the artwork is done on the computer." According to city publishers, handpainted cover designs have reduced immensely in the past few years as they are more time consuming.

Besides, even recycling of cover arts of early years is done to cut costs. "We have some stock paintings and now instead of asking an artist to draw a cover for us, we take our old stock images and merge them with pictures available on the Internet," says Mr Sharma.

Cover art professionals have surely seen better days. "The work of art on the covers of novels, we call them title in our language, gave an identity to these books," says Mustajab Ahmed Siddiqui, who has been painting covers of pulp novels since 1971. He is also known by his pen name Shelle. Apart from the reputation of the author, "title designs) helped in fetching good business for pulp novels".

"In 1971 my first work on a pulp novel was published by Suman Pocket Books and since then I have painted hundreds of titles for pulp novels," says Shelle. Out of his 39-year stint in the industry, he painted covers for 35 years, working for household names in the pulp fiction industry like Prem Bajpai, Ved Prakash Sharma, Surender Mohan Pathak, Anil Mohan, Ranu, Colonel Ranjit and many more.

"I earned Rs 25 for my first title art," Shelle recalls his heydays. "It was for an Urdu book titled Huma Digest. Five months ago, I was paid Rs 5,000 for my lastest work. The remuneration has gone up with the rise in demand of artwork for covers. The value of artists also increased with the sale of the books. Depending on various factors, the charge for designing a cover art varies between Rs 1,000 and 5,000."

Anil Pathak, another popular cover artist who has painted covers for over 500 novels in his 45-year career, rues the loss of hand-work in designing such pages, which were mostly titillating. "Girls used to be the important character of the illustration for any pulp novel.

One perfect cover took two days of work with eight to 10 hours of constant work each day," says Mr Pathak said. He now takes up freelance work for illustrations that has become the next booming business for publication houses in the district.

Javed Hashmi, one of the new generation artists, came into this field in the last decade where pulp business was blooming. "I started painting artwork in 1993 and did it till early 2004. In that period, I worked for almost all pocket book publication houses in Meerut and New Delhi. But today there is no scope left in this profession," he said.

These days, he paints modern art, puts up exhibitions and does portrait work on demand. "When the market for such artwork was completely over the struggle to find new work started again and that's when I begun work for galleries," he anguished. "Sales of pulp novels has come down to just 50 percent compared to sales in the early 90s, during these years the business was at its zenith.

Undoubtedly, sales in small cities always maintained a market for such books; nevertheless, the role of big cities cannot be denied. Even today, the market for these books in small and big cities is 70 and 30 percent respectively," said Mr Sharma of Tulsi Pocket Books.

"Today we just have four artists working for us and two freelancers," Mr Sharma added. Now the work can be completed in a day or two that used to take 10 days. "Earlier a publishing house would easily be spending about Rs 1 crore every year on the covers.

Today the cover printing cost, paper quality and design all of it could cost up to Rs 2.5 crore annually for all books published," says Mr Sharma. "Today we print covers directly through the CD and no longer spend hours getting it on a sheet as earlier." This has brought down the price for the covers drastically. However, vintage pulp writers and artist rue the change. "Hand painted covers were anyday better than what we see today," says famous writer Ved Prakash Sharma. "I surely do relate to covers done then than now."